 "Photo: Doug Klembara")
A Student Government Association Performance and Review Committee decided not to dismiss Election Commissioner Jake Bathman after he was charged with multiple offenses pertaining to the Student Senate election filings.
"A few senators weren't happy with the performance of the election commissioner," said off-campus student Sen. Colt Clemens. Senators raised four grievances against Bathman.
A charge of poor managerial effectiveness was a result of the low turnout for candidate registration. "We had 57 students file for Student Senate," Bathman said. Sixty-four seats were available to be filed for.
He said there were several reasons for the low turnout, such as some officer elections being cut from Class Councils and the Residence Hall Association. The only positions elected through SGA are class president and the RHA president and executive vice president.
Bathman said the low turnout might be a reflection of the way some students perceive senators. "People outside Senate weren't really excited to get into Senate possibly because of how they've seen Senate perform over this past year."
"There could be write-in candidates winning with one or two votes," Clemens said.
Student Body President Conner Prochaska said Bathman was doing a lot to secure high voter turnout and that might have been why he missed some things for promoting filing. "We wanted to re-center and refocus him, and I think that's what we did."
Because he allowed some candidates to file outside of the pre-set filing times, Bathman was charged with violating regulations. Bathman said candidates were allowed to file because there had been confusion about the deadline.
"We had set an informal internal procedure that we were going to - because of the possible confusion with the dates - we were going to accept candidate filing up until the mandatory candidates meeting," Bathman said.
Prochaska said there was a mix up between dates SGA set for filings and the dates on the University calendar. SGA set filing to start five weeks before spring break and the University calendar set it for three weeks after winter break. Prochaska said this normally wouldn't be a problem, but spring break is a week earlier than usual for 2008. He said that Bathman consulted with advisers about what to do because of the confusion with the dates.
Clemens said Bathman was charged with having the inability to correct problems in a timely fashion because of the way he asked for changes in filing rules during the filling period. He said that Bathman had a year to fix any problems he saw in the filing and election process.
Bathman made some changes before the filing process, but Clemens said he wanted to make more while filing was going on.
"During filing, he wanted five or six more changes, and we had to make it emergency legislation," Clemens said. "It was a poor choice to wait this long. He's had a year."
The final charge against Bathman was willful and purposeful disobedience of a Writ of Mandamus handed down by the Judicial Court. Bathman was asked to present a list of all candidates who were allowed to file late.
"I asked for the names of the candidates who filed late by 10:30 [a.m.] on Friday," Clemens said. "But he didn't give it to me until Monday when it was pretty apparent he was about to be removed."
Bathman said the writ was handed down to him by the Judicial Court midday Friday and he complied within one business day, excluding the weekend. "I originally didn't want to comply because I wanted to protect the candidates' confidentiality," Bathman said.
Bathman was warned that any more serious problems could result in his removal from office. Bathman said that the senators had a right to bring the charges against him, but the severity with which it occurred was too severe.
"Neither of these senators spoke with me about these charges, about these things they thought I was doing wrong before submitting this to the Performance Review Committee," Bathman said. "I think it was a pretty harsh first step. Things could have been managed more diplomatically and more personally."
"I have full faith and confidence in Jake [Bathman] and his ability to run an effective and great election, and that is exactly what I think he's going to do," Prochaska said.
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